A lot of EU countries use FIFO for capital gains tax calculation so please give us the option to choose FIFO accounting when requesting annual tax documents (as opposed to the default UK average price).
The account history export is not an answer to this problem. We need to have some kind of official pdf document from Trading212 that states all the capital gains throughout the year accounted by FIFO.
The csv file is no tax proof at all - anyone could generate it and producing FIFO from the csv is not trivial at all if you have a lot of trades.
No reaction from the trading212 team Nobody non-UK cares about this? Has anyone at least found or created an Excel spreadsheet that takes trading212 history and gives us FIFO output?
@goranr this is a community forum for users, that 212 occasionally pop on to help.
I agree, it would be useful if 212 could offer reporting to meet any regions tax requirements, but that would also come at a cost somewhere down the line. We can download csv statements of transactions to work out our own tax returns.
As a community - you could start a thread for your region to discuss how to report taxes, and Iām sure some users will crop up and help.
Here is a really helpful thread for UK users, perhaps you start your own for where you are and see what the community can come up with? I would say Iām decent with excel, but to keep it accessible to all, happy to work with google sheets. There are plenty others on the forum as well that would be willing to help or may already have a solution they could share to keep the platform costs low. I could possibly knock something up at the weekend that works out FIFO fairly quickly, but would need input on how dividends and corporate actions are impacted.
It would surprise me if there wasnāt a solution out there already being used in the community that just needed shared.
It would be great if someone in the community already has a solution and is willing to share it. If you are good at excel and are willing to come up with something over the weekend that, would be much appreciated.
Dividends are not a problem - one can easily deduce how much tax one owns for dividends separately. The only problem is the capital gain/loss induced by buying and selling a security - you may also ignore any fees since these can be just summed up for the whole year separately.
I donāt think that it would impact a significant cost for tradin212 to implement this - they just need the FIFO accounting excel or some similar program and to generate a pdf for the yearly statement as they already do for average cost accounting.
Also it is not so region specific - correct me if I am wrong but one uses either average cost accounting like in UK or FIFO like in US and other parts of EU in calculating tax (I do not think that anyone uses LIFO for instance).
Just to add - even if we calculate our tax by ourselves using excel - how would that be any proof for the local tax authorities if ever needed. I mean, the csv history export is not digitally signed by trading212 so anyone could have produced it and calculated whatever tax one wantsā¦
Is it unreasonable to ask a broker that operates in a region to be able to produce tax documents according to that regions tax rules? I wonder is it not actually required by some law or rule governing brokers?
Actually I did already ask maybe two weeks ago. They said they will bring it up to their team - but I did not get any updates about it after that. I started the same post here to see how many other community members feel the same about it. If many of us ask for this feature, I hope that they will consider to do it sooner than later - tax season is coming.
Do most countries not work on a self declaration basis?
It would be difficult for T212 to verify your tax returns because it has no sight of purchases on other platforms. (Same issue applies with average cost)
Iāve seen that chat before. The simplest solution would be governments to have a centralised trade bank that calculate the right taxes for everyone, but that would cost money to develop and a loss of jobs for tax advisors.
I donāt expect t212 to verify my tax or advise me how to report my tax. The only thing I expect from t212 is a list of trades in the current year accounted by FIFO method in pdf form which I can attach with my self declaring tax report - which is a proof that I did truly report my tax correctly. And so I can also archive this for future If I will ever be audited.
I mean, in case of audit - how will I ever prove that my self declared capital gains tax was correct?
Will they just take my csv export as proof? I think not. I mean, am I just paranoid or no one cares about this issue and just declares tax without thinking of possible audits and proofs?
Take IBKR for example - there I can easily select to export my trades by average/FIFO/LIFO - I really think it is not too much to ask for such an option. We are talking about one additional accounting formula and pdf export feature.
On all other platforms - I export my trades by FIFO - then In January I aggregate all my trades from all platforms, calclute how much tax I owe, pay it and attach pdf exports from all platforms as proof that it is the correct amount. And archive everything for future.
At least in the UK, tax reporting is on an honour system. You do not attach any āproofsā by way of broker pdfs to your tax return. Only if audited would you need to āproveā exactly what shares you bought and sold. This could be done using the official trade confirmations which Trading 212 send you the day after each trade. Of course it would be nice to having something more consolidated, but most people will never be audited.
Having said this, we know HMRC is worried about the amount of tax lost because taxpayers make mistakes. There is in the pipeline a programme called Making Tax Digital, which is intended eventually to encompass capital gains and dividends.
The CSVs seem like reasonable proof that you have declared the transactions truthfully. There are transaction IDs on there to validate against if required.
I can see why your suggestion is a lot easier though if you only use one platform.
I also live in Croatia, I think CSV as a proof is enough for authorities.
Does T212 has an API? If they do, I might be able to develop plug in to generate PDFās from transaction history.
I guess you have more faith in āPoreznaā (Croatian tax authority) than I do
IDK, if the transaction IDs proove anything, maybe they do. But is it chekable by some clerk in foreign tax office? I sincerely doubt. And who will the clerk ask then for proof - I guess me, and then I will again have to bother t212 to give me some form of proof. And that is exactly what I ask preemptively now.
The least we need, in my opinion, is csv + the same csv exported in pdf with official t212 header.
I mean, imagine if someone gave you a receipt in plain csv form - who would take that as a serious proof?
But even if ignore all this about is csv enough proof or not, it would be a really nice and useful feature if t212 could implement the option of yearly fifo accounting as it is the industry norm.
People can use multiple broker, you will never have one āofficialā document which calculates all your taxes.
Imagine if you have:
Broker A - you have 1000$ profits, you have to pay capital gain tax on that amount
Broker B - you have -500$ loss, but in FIFO you will have to pay 0 capital gain tax
In reality you have to pay capital gain on 500$, but you canāt have official document on that, you have to calculate it yourself/by professional
API is Application Programming Interface, seems T212 doesnāt have it (yet)
That means instead of you downloading CSV manually, I could write a little app which connects to your transaction history and automatically generates FIFO PDF for you.
APIās are usually used for integrations or adding functionality to the existing app.
If you are in doubt, you can always check with your personal referent at Tax authority, they can be quite helpful.
Agreed, but letās keep real, even if people use multiple brokers they will probably not buy/sell same securities at different times in different lots at different brokers. So in reality, this multiple broker scenario would amount to just summing up gain and loss across all the brokers which most people can do by hand - like you did in your example
This is like 99.99% easier than doing FIFO for hundreds of transactions in fractional shares at one particular broker.
I donāt know how to program a script that would take the t212 csv and produce the FIFO out of it but I am sure that the algorithm is well known and probably skilled people can do it rather quickly.
I can do it also with a CSV file, itās really not a problem. But not sure Iāll have the time to develop it:)
If I develop it, Iāll make it publicly available for free on GitHub, so anyone can use it.
Maybe around Christmas when Iāll be on vacation. Programming is my day job, so Iām not a fan of additional programming on vacations
I only buy stocks and after 2 years they are calculated as investment, so 0% capital gain tax on that, so Iām personally not bothered with calculating taxes (yet). If I was, I would already programmed it
Great, if you ever find time to do it, please let us know here. It would be much appreciated.
Although, if I may add, I feel this should really be t212ās job. I mean UK crowd gets a nice yearly tax statement that they can use to fill their taxes in like 5 minutes, while FIFO crowd first has to do their own accounting acrobaticsā¦
Development wise surely if we did something, just design a generic calculator that works if the data input is in a set format to reduce the dev time needed? Take a CSV, define the must-haves, should-haves, could-haves and wonāt haves. Then we just need a mapping scheme from each broker to that CSV input template. The mapping scheme would be much quicker to update to allow inputs from multiple brokers than any change in code, and something none coders could help with
Nobody non-UK cares about this? Has anyone at least found or created an Excel spreadsheet that takes trading212 history and gives us FIFO output?
